David Hirst, The Guardian, February 23:
If the Hamas assumption of power is truly a watershed, it will be an Arab and Muslim, not just Palestinian, one. It has long been said that in so far as Arabs and Palestinians ever formally accommodated themselves to Israel it was Arab despotism, not democracy, that made it possible. To be sure, Arab public opinion might have been moving away, if only in the weariness of repeated defeat, from the all-pervading “rejectionism” of the conflict’s earlier stages, but never far enough for those rulers who did make peace with Israel to do so with anything seriously resembling a popular mandate. “Israel,” said Aluf Benn in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, “could always do business with Arab dictators, a barrier protecting it from the rage of the ‘Arab street’. That was the basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Yasser Arafat and his heirs and the rules vis-a-vis Syria and Lebanon. But those days are over. Henceforth Israel will have to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored – Arab public opinion.”…